Summer is here, and I’m currently in the process of packing to move. It turns out you can acquire a shocking amount of junk when you spend almost 15 years in a house, so I’m going through it and getting rid of everything I can.
This past month was light on reading, but I did manage to get through a couple of books.
Where possible, I’ve included Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon. If any of these books pique your interest, please use those links. I’ll get a small commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of Armageddon bunkers for billionaires.
I’m still reading Discworld with the kids at bedtime. This title features some of my favorite recurring characters: Death (and the miniature rat version, the Death of Rats); Susan, his grand-daughter; the wizards of Unseen University; and the mysterious and villainous Auditors, who are not permitted to meddle in the affairs of mortals, but keep coming up with clever schemes to wipe them out so the universe can be neat and orderly.
The Discworld version of Death is, in some ways, the classic trope of the robot who wants to become human. He may be an anthropomorphic personification, but he has spent centuries around people, and he can’t help that they’ve rubbed off on him.
Thanks to the Auditors, the Hogfather (Discworld’s version of Santa Claus) is missing in action, and it’s up to Death to take his place and keep the world believing in him. It’s a Nightmare Before Christmas with ancient gods and extra-dimensional monsters.
Susan is pulled into Death’s schemes against her will, determined (but mostly failing) to live a “normal” life instead of the inevitably strange life of the woman whose grandfather is the personification of Death.
Hogfather is a meditation on the way people create the gods they need, while also being a completely silly story about bumbling wizards, a skeleton posing as a mall Santa with a strap-on beard, and a governess who actually finds the monsters under the children’s beds, and resolves the issue with the sharp end of the fire poker.
Novelty is a book of four stories, two longer, and two shorter. Its themes and some elements of its plots are very science-fictiony, but the style is literary. It feels like a 1980s precursor to the “new weird” of Jeff Vandermeer or China Miéville.
“The Nightingale Sings at Night” begins in classic myth-story fashion with an explanation of the nightingale’s unusual song. It’s a retelling of the fall of man from Genesis, but the structure feels like something straight out of Aesop’s Fables. It’s a great example of using a classic story structure as a jumping-off point.
“Great work of time” is the longest story of the bunch, and a fantastic time travel story. Like all time travel stories, it’s linear from one perspective and non-linear from another.
Caspar Last is an imminently reasonable man who invents a time machine and decides to use it only once, in order to make enough money to live out the rest of his days in moderate comfort. However, he is tricked into giving up his invention to a secretive group calling themselves the Otherhood. They use the time machine, first and foremost, to sow peace around the world and build up the British Empire. They also use it to ensure their group’s own creation.
However, all this meddling in time has strange effects. The peace they create has its costs, twisting the world beyond all recognition. One member discovers that the Otherhood’s twisted timeline will eventually result in a sort of quiet cataclysm, a world so at peace that there is nothing but endless forest growing out of a quiet sea. The only way to prevent this terrible future is to undo everything the Otherhood has done.
“In Blue” is a story set some time in the future, in an unnamed city. Refugees crowd an ancient city that is being systematically rebuilt. There has been pseudo-communist Revolution, and lives are governed by a social calculus and act-field theory, mathematics that govern society and all interactions between people. The protagonist, Hare, is a member of the cadre that organizes society without overtly ruling it, but he becomes overwhelmed by his duties and has a mental break.
The final story, “Novelty” is the most literary (or, at least, the lightest on plot): a story about an author in a bar, realizing what his next book will be about. He decides he must write a book on the “pull men feel between Novelty and Security,” the drive to discover something new versus the safety of the known. The implication is that the story is at least a little autobiographical, and the book we’re reading is the book he will write.
What I’m Reading In June
I’m not sure how much reading I’ll actually be able to do, but I’m still working on the Witcher series and Discworld. I’m also continuing my goal of reading at least one anthology of short stories each month, and recently picked up a volume of stories from Apex which seems perfect for summer reading.
Here in Minnesota, April showers have brought May…showers. It’s been rainy, drizzly, or just generally damp. Everything is slowly greening up, and Spring is going to sproing the moment the sun comes out.
This past month, I finished my read-through of the main series League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics, I got back into Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books with my kids, and I finally received my Kickstarter-backed edition of The Secret World TTRPG.
Where possible, I’ve included Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon. If any of these books pique your interest, please use those links. I’ll get a small commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of mega-yachts for billionaires.
Written by Alan Moore, Illustrated by Kevin O’Neill
After the first two volumes of League, I was a little disappointed in The Black Dossier, which was more backstory than story. I was curious to see where Volume 3 would take us. As it turns out, it’s both forward and backward in time.
As the subtitle suggests, the book covers a full one hundred years of the League. The main storyline of Black Dossier took place in the 1950s, but the story of Volume 3 begins just before the coronation of King George V, which is mid-1911, assuming the date in the alternate timeline of League lines up with real world history. This version of the League sees Mina Harker and Allan Quatermain joined by the immortal Orlando; occultist Thomas Carnacki; and gentleman thief A. J. Raffles.
The mystery that these characters seek to unravel throughout the book is the work of a cult founded by Oliver Haddo, who turns out to be a body-hopping mystic intent on creating the antichrist. The more immortal members of the League, Mina, Quatermain, and Orlando, investigate the cult over the course of the century. Their failure to stop the cult is matched by the cult’s own failure to create a proper apocalyptic monster.
This century sees the League eventually crumble, Mina falling into a drug-and-mysticism-induced fugue, Quatermain reviving his abusive relationship with Heroin, and Orlando getting lost in the violence of war.
It isn’t until 2009 that the League’s long-time mystical benefactor, Duke Prospero, contacts a reformed Orlando, who springs Mina from a mental institution. They join up with Allan just in time to confront the Harry Potter-esque magical antichrist, who is put down by an entirely appropriate modern myth who I’ll refrain from naming, lest I spoil the fun.
This third (technically fourth) volume once again shows the League as mostly ineffective. They are still involved in the big movements of the world, but none of their meddling does much good.
With the move away from steampunk Victorian England, some more recent pop-culture references inject fresh fun into the series, although I couldn’t help noting that twisted versions of Harry Potter have already been done elsewhere, and in my opinion, more effectively.
Written by Alan Moore, Illustrated by Kevin O’Neill
In this final volume of the main-line League books, Mina Harker, Orlando, and the freshly recruited Emma Night (a.k.a. M) are all that remains of the League in alt-history 2010.
In some ways, Volume 4 has learned lessons from the weak points of the previous books. The authors are playing with formats again, bringing back the 3D glasses sections and including parts reminiscent of classic superhero comics. These format-shifts add variety without being as gimmicky as Black Dossier.
The story alternates between three time periods. The 1970s sections follow superhero squad The Seven Stars, organized by Mina while disguised as Vull the Invisible. In 2010, the time travelers seek Vull and any remaining superheroes. In the 30th century, an apocalypse has occurred and a desperate few freedom fighters engineer a trip back in time to prevent the catastrophe.
The true history behind the League and the reason for its existence are finally revealed to be part of a vast conspiracy that also encompasses British Military Intelligence (with a host of oblique James Bond references) and Shakespearean-era faery politics.
While League has never shied away from killing off major characters, Volume 4 is perfectly happy to burn all the bridges. While a few characters manage to escape disaster and even find some semblance of happiness, the entire setting burns down around them, with time travelers making it clear that the cataclysm won’t be cleaned up for hundreds of years.
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a series built on literary references, and it has finally run the full gamut of time periods. This feels like a suitable ending. (At least until the thirtieth century, when I fully expect Alan Moore’s frozen head to be revived for Volume 5.)
I finally finished reading the Harry Potter series with my children last month. After that, I decided we ought to jump into some lighter fantasy, returning to the nearly inexhaustible Discworld series.
Pratchett has crafted a fantastic setting and populated it with a gigantic cast of interesting characters, but each book tends to follow particular groups. Feet of Clay follows Sam Vimes and his city watch in Ankh Morpork. The city’s patrician, Lord Vetinari, is being slowly poisoned, and it’s up to the Watch to figure out whodunnit.
The mystery provides the structure of the story, but the joy of any Discworld book is in the wonderful craft and comedy that Pratchett puts into almost every sentence, and the interactions between the characters. I think the craft of comedy writers tends to be underappreciated, but Pratchett at his best is as good as anyone out there.
The Secret World began life as a 2012 MMORPG. Sadly, 2012 was one of the last few years when game developers still believed that the market for MMOs was infinite, and that it might somehow be possible for someone…anyone…to dethrone the longtime king of the genre, World of Warcraft.
While Secret World did a bunch of interesting, innovative things, it was really the modern, urban, “every conspiracy theory is true” setting, slow-burn mysteries, and brilliant writing that set it apart. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to overcome its clunky gameplay. The game stumbled along for several years, eventually spawning an updated, free to play re-launch and a few smaller games in the same universe.
I won’t lie. When I heard about a table-top RPG based on the IP, I was excited. The setting and story were always the best part of the Secret World, so a TTRPG made perfect sense to me.
The rules are based on 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons, lightly adapted to a more modern, more urban setting and the Secret World character system. At this point, 5e D&D is probably both the most popular and most disliked TTRPG system out there. Because it’s so ubiquitous, and many people directly equate role playing games with D&D, it’s the obvious choice when adapting an IP that most people have never heard of. No point in limiting your audience.
Unfortunately, 5e has its downsides, and I suspect that the Secret World has once again paired its fun settings and stories with clunky gameplay systems. The book’s creators, Star Anvil Studios, might realize this, because as soon as they finished this edition, they announced a new Kickstarter to bring the Secret World setting to the Savage Worlds rule set. Or maybe it’s just a way to cash in in the IP by writing a new book that is 70% the same as the old book.
The 5e core book defines nine classes that will be familiar to anyone who has played Secret World Legends. Everyone is a spellcaster to some degree, but two of the classes are all about the spells. There is no true multi-classing, but there are Secret Architypes, which are like mini-classes that characters can collect as they level. Only one can be active at a time, but they can be swapped with a short rest. It feels like a fun way to scale characters horizontally, but I wonder if high-level characters will feel too much like a jumble of abilities.
The biggest draw, to me, is the setting, and the book wisely dedicates about 60% of its pages to the world, with descriptions of a large number of NPCs, the factions, and a good amount of the history and lore from the games. Sadly, there are limits to how much can fit in a single core book like this. The game will still likely be much more fun in the hands of a game master who knows their way around the Secret World setting.
There was a single premade adventure released as a part of the Kickstarter materials. I would love it if Star Anvil was able to craft a couple more, although I won’t be holding my breath.
What I’m Reading in May
I’m still reading The Witcher. For my short story fix, I’m thinking I’ll tackle a sci-fi novella collection from the 80s. And I’ve got a book of writing advice that has been calling my name for a while. See you in May!
Well, we’re halfway through April, but I’m just getting around to my monthly reading recap. This month was mostly continuing series: The Witcher, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and finally finishing Harry Potter with my kids.
Where possible, I’ve included Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon. If any of these book pique your interest, please use those links. I’ll get a small commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of mega-yachts for billionaires.
Hemingway is often cited as the pinnacle of American short fiction, and I haven’t read any of his work since college. Perfect for my year of short stories. However, this particular collection is 650 pages, and I only managed about half of that in March, so I’ll be continuing in April.
If you’ve heard anything about Hemingway, it was probably that he’s known for his short, terse sentences. While those sentences are certainly present, he actually mixes up his sentence styles quite a bit. I feel like this description of him has been cargo-culted through undergrad English programs for decades. Possibly unpopular opinion: many of his best sentences are quite long.
While the majority of Hemingway stories are quite short and straightforward, the language is sometimes a little bit of a slog. We’re far enough removed from the times and places in these stories that it’s like visiting another land. The style and word choice is old fashioned enough that it’s sometimes like translating a different dialect. It’s not like parsing Shakespeare or anything, but I’m probably getting less out of it than a contemporary reader would.
None of these stories are particularly plot-heavy, and many are vignettes with scarcely any plot at all. They capture a feeling and a place and time, but I find myself wishing that more would happen.
If you’re a modern reader who is acclimated to fast-paced, plot-heavy stories, and you’re not interested in the historical value or the literary prose, I can’t really recommend reading all of the Complete Hemingway. However, I think anyone with an interest in short fiction should read at least a few of his more famous stories.
War is raging between the kingdoms of the north and Nilfgard. The Witcher is recovering from a near-fatal beating at the hands of the traitorous sorcerer, Vigilfortz. Ciri has become a bandit in Nilfgard, (though Nilfgard claims she is safe under the protection of the Emperor). Yennefer is gone, missing after the battle at the sorcerer’s conclave.
We appear to have reached the section of the fantasy series where the main characters are all split up and must fend for themselves. For Ciri, this means having to survive for the first time without the protection of Geralt or Yennefer, and falling in with a very bad crowd.
For Geralt, the Witcher, this means coming to grips with the possibility that he is not strong enough to protect the people he loves without some help. Despite himself, he collects a motly crew that includes his longtime bard friend, Dandelion; Regis, the old alchemist with a dark secret; Milva, the human archer allied with the non-human scoi’atel rebellion; and a caravan of kind-hearted dwarves scavenging and collecting refugees in the wake of battle.
Yennefer’s absence remains a mystery for most of the book, but she comes back into the story with a meeting of a new alliance of sorceresses from the north and Nilfgard. As usual, the wizards are always plotting ways to control the events of the world. Unfortunately, those plans still involve Ciri.
The strength of the Witcher books thus far is the way the story integrates the large-scale political machinations and battles with the personal connections between characters.
Written by Alan Moore, Illustrated by Kevin O’Neal
We begin with John Carter and Gullivar Jones as leaders in a war of many races on mars. One alien race, holed up in a fortress, escapes in rockets headed for earth. Thus begins the Martian invasion of tripods, a la War of the Worlds.
The first volume of League was so short and introduced so many characters that there was limited opportunity to delve into each one. It worked, partly, because the source material was already familiar. In Volume 2, there is space for more characterization: romance, betrayal, and plenty of fractures and disagreements between the League’s members (as well as Bond, M, and the British government).
If Volume 1 was the origin story, Volume 2 feels like an abrupt finale. Two members of the League end up dead and the rest are estranged by the time the story is over.
The weakness of the series so far is that all these exciting characters have so little control of their own lives. The violent and self-centered Hyde and Griffin act on their own impulses, mostly to their detriment. Mina and Quatermain, and to some extent Nemo, are the “good kids” of the group, who actually follow orders, and are once again used to carry out actions they don’t understand or necessarily agree with. While the League plays a major role in the fight against the martians, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were side characters in their own story.
Volume 2 concludes with a thirty-page illustrated travelogue that hints at several earlier iterations of the League, composed of literary characters from previous eras. It also hints at the future.
Like the Quatermain story at the end of the first volume, this was too tedious for me, and I ended up skimming by the end. There are tantalizing references to the previous Leagues and the adventures of Allan and Mina will have after the Martian invasion. But much like Calvino’s Invisible Cities, endless descriptions of fantastic places become dull when they have no characters or plot to anchor them.
Written by Alan Moore, Illustrated by Kevin O’Neal
Set in the same alternate universe as the first two volumes, we’ve jumped to 1958. The totalitarian post-war Big Brother government has just fallen in England, and Mina Harker and Allan Quatermain are back after years abroad.
Black Dossier expects the reader to have slogged through the travelogue at the end of Volume 2, which contains a lot of mostly elided story. It explains where the pair have been all these years, why they are young-bodied and effectively immortal, who the heck this Orlando character is, and what exactly is up with the Blazing World.
Black Dossier is a very strange comic, a time-jumping multimedia extravaganza. It begins as an ordinary comic, as Mina and Quatermain trick a rather nasty version of James Bond into gaining them access to military intelligence records. They proceed to find the black dossier of information about all the different incarnations of the League, and make their escape.
Safely back at their boarding house lodgings, they begin to read the dossier. Then the narrative pauses to show the contents of the files.
The rest of the books shifts back and forth between Mina and Quatermain in ’58, fleeing military intelligence, and the dossier’s files, which range from lost Shakespearean folios to memoirs and maps, to borderline erotica/porn.
This book is incredibly horny. It makes some sense, with the pulp fiction roots that the series embraces wholeheartedly, but at a certain point it just comes across as a little juvenile, especially when some sections have no purpose in the story and exist just to be sexy.
The book ends with a 3D glasses chapter, and a play on the end of midsummer night’s dream — instead of comparing stories to dreams, it plays on the way science fiction has shaped the world over the years.
The League books have always been a mix of high-brow and pulpy. Unfortunately, the whole experience is pretty uneven. Some sections are dull and self-indulgent, feeling more like a collection of backstory notes than proper story, and it’s frustrating that you need to cross-reference everything to get a sense of exactly what’s going on.
This final book of the series eschews the structures that have held fast through the previous books. Harry isn’t going to school. He’s on the run, searching for the immortal lich villain’s phylacteries horcruxes. The story alternates between a series of narrow escapes and heists.
The death of a secondary character at the end of the fourth book was fairly shocking compared to the surrounding material, but the tone is so much darker by this final book that major characters are dying every few chapters.
The biggest problem I have with this book is how much time the three protagonists spend wandering, with no idea what to do. They fight, separate, come back together. They argue and complain. The middle of the story gets bogged down and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. It’s too bad, because the first third and last third of the book are packed with good action.
Right in the center of this soggy middle is a sequence where the main characters acquire an important macguffin without any effort on their part. This is all explained much later, but it still feels like a major success falling into their laps almost accidentally.
Finally, I have to complain at least a little bit about the amount of info-dumping that occurs in the last couple chapters of the book. The biggest info-dump comes through the pensieve, a magical device that allows Harry to view other people’s memories. This device is Rowling’s exposition machine in the latter half of the series, but it is exercised to such an extent in this book that we effectively get a whole chapter of wading through memories. I can’t help but feel that this was a bit of a cop-out, allowing Rowling an easy way to reveal all the important secrets of a major character right at the end, without any of the messy difficulties of figuring out how the characters could discover that information.
With all that said, and the occasional other complaints I’ve lodged in earlier Read Reports, the series holds up pretty well. It feels relatively unique in the way its voice changes so significantly from the beginning of the series to the end. It also creates a huge cast of interesting characters. So even if I may be irritated by the inconsistencies of the magic or the incredible dysfunctionality of wizard society and government, the story still gets me to care about what’s happening to Harry and his friends.
What I’m Reading in April
I’m going to be finishing off the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Volumes three and four. I’ll be reading the fourth novel in the Witcher Saga, Tower of Swallows. I’ll also be doing my best to finish The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.
March has begun with an unseasonably warm weekend. Here in Minnesota, where we’re used to rough winters, it barely feels like we had any winter at all. Let’s jump back to February for my monthly report on what I’ve been reading.
To stay on theme, I’m trying to read more short stories this year. I end up reading quite a few while researching markets, but I’ve also got a stack of anthologies on my bookshelf that I’ll be reading as the year goes on.
I’m getting close to wrapping up the read-through of Harry Potter with my kids, and I finally returned to The Witcher series after an unplanned hiatus.
Where possible, I’ve included Bookshop.org affiliate links instead of Amazon. If any of these book pique your interest, please use those links. I’ll get a small commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of gig economy worker abuse.
(Unfortunately, may only be available on Kindle Unlimited now)
For my February short stories, I picked Time Shift, an anthology of time travel flash fiction I picked up as a backer reward from The Martian Magazine.
Anthologies like this are awesome when you only have five or ten minutes to read. This one is even nicely pocket-sized. However, I’m reminded why I don’t like narrow themes like this. While any of these stories, individually, is good, thirty-eight stories about time travel, all in a row, started to feel repetitive.
If you like time travel and flash fiction, this is certainly the anthology for you. But if you’re like me, you might want to only consume them a few at a time.
I never intended to take a break from The Witcher series, but I got distracted by this and that, and suddenly a few months had gone by. The Witcher books consist of a five-book series, along with three anthologies of short stories that interconnect with the larger story. Time of Contempt is the fourth Witcher book, and the second book in the main series.
The setting for the story is the Northern Kingdoms, about a dozen countries of various sizes in a vaguely Nordic, medieval, semi-feudal fantasy world. A few years have passed since the attempted invasion of the huge southern Nilfgaardian Empire was barely stopped by an alliance of kingdoms and sorcerers in a decisive battle.
The Witcher, Geralt, had had his run-ins with royals in the past, but he’s made a point of staying out of politics. Now, however, he finds himself entangled by his ties to his adopted daughter, Cintran princess Ciri, and his sorceress partner Yennifer. War is brewing again between the Northern Kingdoms and Nilfgaard, but back-stabbing politics between kingdoms and factions of sorcerers make it look increasingly unlikely that the North will be able to unify again against their stronger adversary.
Ciri, despite her kingdom lying in ruins, is sought by royals and spies on both sides for her ability to legitimize claims over disputed lands near the center of the conflict. Some would kill her, while others would use her as a figurehead for political marriage. Even worse, she is believed by sorcerers and others to be the prophesied Child of Elder Blood, who may be destined to set off and/or finish a conflict of apocalyptic proportions.
Sapkowski does a great job combining the often humble difficulties of these powerful—but ultimately fallible and mortal—main characters, with the politics and machinations of classic high fantasy. All of the big movements of the world are revealed through small interactions. The widespread preparations for war are shown by following a royal messenger as he delivers secret messages, or the changes in market prices noted by a banker who sees the rich hedging their bets and fleeing in droves.
Geralt is the reluctant hero who could theoretically just walk away from all of this, but the people he loves cannot, so he gets drawn in through his efforts to protect them. He’s a likable character because he’s smart and moral, but he’s perpetually fighting a defensive fight to shield his family from forces he doesn’t entirely understand. The surface-level causes and effects of the war make sense, but it’s clear that there are deeper drivers of world events that haven’t yet been revealed: the Emperor of Nilfgaard and the Sorcerer Vigelfortz are both after Ciri because of something to do with the prophecy, but we don’t know why.
The languages and cultures of the world are, for my money, on par with the greats of the fantasy genre. The world is more gritty and grounded than the squeaky-clean high fantasy of Lord of the Rings, and the Polish influences make it feel distinct from the glut of generic Western European D&D knock-offs. The Elder Speech used by non-humans and sorcerers feels like a real language, and though few words are directly translated, it is consistent enough that phrases and patterns become familiar and recognizable.
Having recently read Palaniuk’s book on writing, I noticed some similarities in Sapkowski’s style. Palaniuk advocates writing each chapter of a book as a short story that can effectively stand alone. The early Witcher books are short stories that contribute to a larger narrative. The series books are more focused, but most sections are still nicely self-contained, and there are many smaller pieces within the narrative that could stand alone, without the context of the series.
The Time of Contempt ends with the three main characters separated, each of them in a bad place. However, they are survivors, and the question is how they will be able to get back together and solve the problems that plague them.
If it isn’t obvious, I’m delighted to be back in this series. It’s a joy to read, and I plan to plow through the rest of the books in the near future.
Half-Blood Prince might be the most interesting Harry Potter book. In a series that relies on patterns that repeat in each book, this is the book where most of the patterns get broken.
The Harry Potter books usually slavishly follow Harry’s perspective. Half-Blood Prince, however, opens with two chapters where the namesake character is conspicuously absent. The first is a meeting between the newly elected wizard Minister of Magic and the “muggle” Prime Minister, showing just how much the war between wizards is bleeding out from their usually secret world. The second is a meeting between the bad guys where a promise is made that will be fulfilled at the end of the book.
This collapse of familiar structures mirrors the plot: the order of the wizard world, and the world as Harry Potter understands it, is falling apart. Despite this, it might be the most well-plotted book in the series.
The language in this book is also different. This is partly a continuation of the trend away from the childishness of the first few books, as the language grew alongside the audience. It’s also clear that some of this came with Rowling gaining experience. I’m sure she had a stellar editing team at this point as well. However, I suspect that the language is more cinematic, more vividly descriptive, partly because Rowling had the opportunity to see the first couple books adapted as movies by the time the series was wrapping up.
The ending of this book is, of course, the big twist that has become something of a meme by now. But that’s because it’s a pretty good twist. It’s hard to imagine a bigger, more unexpected plot point for the series, short of one of the three main characters dying. This ending really is the ultimate way to signal that the story is now off the map. The final book will do without the patterns and conventions of the previous six, and will tread into the darkest territory of the series.
I fell backward into this series, reading the TTRPG rulebook based on the comic before I got the book itself. My understanding is that they were created in tandem though, so it seems appropriate.
The book itself is a beautiful, monstrously thick hardback with an understated black cover. The slightly oversized comics form factor feels oddly tall and skinny for a book with this much heft. The art is full color, and the style is dreamlike. Almost every panel is either crowded with shadows or blown-out with background light.
The first two chapters describe the backstory: a group of misfit teens play a magical RPG that sucks them into the fantasy world of the game. They don’t return until two years later, missing one person and one arm, and considerably worse for wear. They never tell anyone what happened to them.
Twenty years pass, and they meet up again, brought together by the mysterious return of the magical dice that transported them, and memories of the player they left behind. Most of their lives aren’t going well. They still carry the traumas of their past. Once again, they’re sucked into the fantasy world of Die.
Like so many of the stories I’m drawn to, Die is a metafiction, obsessed with the structures and dynamics of stories. Where Sandman is a contemplation of dreams and myths, and The Unwritten is a study in fantasy tropes, Die is an analysis of story and conflict in tabletop RPGs, and the interplay between players, player-characters, and the game. In fact, the back of the book is taken up with a number of essays on TTRPGs written concurrently with the story itself.
Unfortunately, I feel like Die is a little too eager to define itself in shorthand references to greater works. It bludgeons the reader with big nods to Tolkein, Wells and Lovecraft, but they are shallow references, and not enough new and interesting is built on top of them. Die is constantly saying things like
The Fair are…”What if William Gibson designed elves.”
…or…
Glass Town is Rivendell meets Casablanca, Oz in No Man’s Land.
Eventually, I found myself desperate for something in the world that wasn’t described in terms of something else. Unfortunately, the gods of Die and the Fallen half-zombies are the most unique aspects of the setting, but they’re only rarely touched upon. I couldn’t help feeling that Die is a little too clever, and a little too eager to show you how clever it is. There is a certain cynicism to a story that hides behind its influences. By not exposing its heart, the story and the author don’t leave themselves open to praise or criticism in their own right.
Die is driven by a simple idea: the characters are trapped in this fictional world, and the only way they can go home is if they all agree to it. The challenge is that they do not get along, so getting everyone to agree is no simple task. It can’t be done through force, only through negotiation.
While that’s a fun concept, I felt like the motivations of the characters were too mercurial. Their disagreements and fights felt too arbitrary, too inorganic. It’s the soap opera problem, where the characters whims shift in service to every twist and turn in the plot.
In retrospect, I see that a lot of my review here is negative, and that is probably unfair. Die ultimately didn’t quite land for me, but it does do a lot of things well. The art is beautiful, and it presents a huge number of interesting ideas. And while many of them work on a granular level, they don’t quite mesh into a satisfying whole.
I’m not the most die-hard fan of TTRPGs, but I’ve played a decent amount. Over the years, I’ve come to realize and accept that the story in a TTRPG campaign will never conform to the shape of a well-crafted novel or movie. As a GM, trying to make that kind of story is a mistake. It can’t work when there are four or more people all driving it together. There will be tangents. It will meander. And that’s okay. It’s a different sort of experience than a novel or movie. Despite the incredible popularity of TTRPG “actual play” podcasts and videos in recent years, I firmly believe these stories are more enjoyable as a contributor than they are as an external viewer.
Strangely, I feel the same way about Die. I can feel a great story in there for someone, I just wasn’t able to experience it myself.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was originally published in 1999. Ironically perhaps, for a series that cribs from the earliest science fiction, it feels older than that. I suspect that feeling is due to the outsized influence that League has had on indie comics. We see echoes of it in many things that came after, so when we return to the original, it seems a little less unique and strange than it did at first. But it still holds up pretty well.
If Die is a story that rubs me the wrong way with its blatant references to other stories, League is the polar opposite. Practically every single page is jammed to the gills with references to turn of the 20th century proto-science-fiction. However, there are no winks and no nods. The story doesn’t feel the need to draw attention to the references.
In the first few pages, our scarf-clad main character, Mina Harker (né Murray) meets with her employer, Campion Bond, who works for a mysterious M. Then she’s off to retrieve a second main character, the opium-addled Alan Quatermain, taking the taciturn Mr. Nemo’s submersible. The League is rounded out with the help of Mssr. Dupin in acquiring the two-faced Dr. Jekyl, and they locate a certain invisible man at the estate of Rosa Cootes.
The story is so stuffed with familiar names that it’s easy to latch on to Jekyl or Nemo or the invisible man and not worry about the rest. But an avid reader can search out every name and turn up another interesting lost corner of old pulp literature. League draws upon an absurd number of stories and mashes them together with reckless abandon. The result is something pulpy and silly and occasionally self-serious in much the same ways as the stories that it cribs from.
The story fully embraces the casual racism, sexism, self-righteous colonialism, and all the other -isms endemic to the British Empire as it approached the 20th century. This could easily come across as crass, but it manages to feel accurate to that world and time period. And as the main characters tend to be on the receiving end more often than not, it doesn’t feel as though these ideas or behaviors are condoned.
That’s not to say that the protagonists are good people all of the time. Or even most of the time. They don’t get along with each other, let alone the rest of the world around them.
The art is a style that I’m not sure I’ve seen elsewhere. It’s detailed and scribbly in equal measure, with impossible, caricature proportions that combine realistic and cartoon aesthetics.
At the end of the six issue series is a lightly-illustrated bonus story called “Allan and the Sundered Devil.” This adds a little more color to Quatermain’s character and acts as a mini-prequel to the main story. It leans into the pulp fiction premise of League even more than the comic, and the prose is so purple that I found it a little much to read.
This is the only volume that I’ve read previously, but the pile of comics I received at Christmas included three more volumes of League. I’ll be reading those in the coming months and seeing how they hold up compared to the first. This one, at least, I would consider a must-read for any fan of non-superhero comics.
What I’m Reading In March
The final book of Harry Potter, the continuation of The Witcher and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. For short stories, I’ve got some light reading lined up in The Complete Works of Ernest Hemingway.
It’s a new year. I’m working on the pile of books and comics I got for Christmas, and mostly ignoring the books I had planned to read. Someday I’ll get back to The Witcher. Someday.
If any of these sound interesting, please use my bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon. I’ll get a small commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of phallic rockets for billionaires.
I thought I had read nearly all of the Gaiman/McKean comics collaborations, but this one somehow slipped under my radar. Published in 1989, Signal to Noise is almost a prototype of their future work. It’s a little less subtle with its themes than later works, but it still shows that expertise at crafting a story that can be observed from a dozen different angles to reveal some new through-line or idea.
The “noise” cutting through the signal of the story is nonsensical text, hinting at meaning without ever finding it. At the end of the book, it’s explained that this text was produced by a text sampler program, a 1989 prototype of the LLMs that have recently become so prevalent.
McKean’s illustrations are a fever-dream. The filmmaker inhabits a foggy ghost world. The movie in his head is unfocused and clogged with snow. Pops of color cut through: the yellow of a wheel clamp on an illegally-parked car, a red traffic light, a rare splash of green from a potted plant. The story is drowning in monochrome blue-white-gray, and the splashes of color are quick breaths before going under again. The panels shift between purposely similar 4×4 squares (evoking strips of film) and luscious full-page spreads, especially potent in this oversized form-factor.
The main character is a filmmaker, who is dying. He’s composing a movie in his head: people in the year 999, waiting for the new year, when they expect the world to end. A dying man composing a story of the apocalypse. But the apocalypse never came for those people.
For me, the resonating theme of the book is creator’s remorse. The work, when done, is never as good as it was in your head. But there is always hope that the next piece will be the one that works. Still, there is joy in it. A finished piece of art evokes “the feeling that one has clawed back something from eternity, that one has put something over on a nodding god, that one has beaten the system.”
Continuing the theme of old Gaiman comics, we have short spin-off in the Sandman universe, starring the effervescent goth girl Death, possibly the most popular of the Endless, apart from Dream.
Once each century, Death must spend a day as a mortal, and this just happens to be that day. She meets a boy named Sexton, who happens to have written a suicide note he has yet to act on. He is utterly disillusioned with the world, as only an inexperienced teenager can be.
Death, going by Didi today, explains who she is and invites Sexton to spend the day with her. He does , complaining all the way, and only slowly coming to believe Didi really is the personification of Death.
The magic of the Sandman version of Death is that she knows everyone, and she loves everyone, regardless of how the average human might judge them. She embodies the Christian ideal of kindness that many people aspire to, and none really achieve. So, of course, she goes on a little adventure with Sexton, and it changes him. He gains a new outlook on life. I won’t spoil who ends up dying at the end.
If you like the Sandman universe, this is a fun little jaunt along the edges of it, with a few familiar faces, and a good story in its own right.
Persepolis is autobiographical history in the comic tradition of Maus. The author grew up in Iran, living in a well-off family of intellectuals.
The first part of the book is largely about Satrapi’s childhood, and the many revolutionary elements that led to the overthrow of the Shah, followed by the disappointment of groups like the communist revolutionaries when the movement was hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists.
In the second half, Satrapi moves overseas, attends college in Germany. She gets into drugs, spends time homeless, and manages to rebuild her life. After her time abroad, she returns to Iran and finds herself chafing against the rules of the regime.
She finds a boyfriend and marries, but they are almost immediately unhappy. The end of the book is abrupt. She gets a divorce and moves overseas again, this time to France.
Although it’s sometimes disjointed, the book is a great ground-level introduction to the recent history of Iran and a culture that I certainly didn’t learn much about, growing up in America.
There seems to be an inherent dissonance in Iranian culture between public and private life. Despite Islamic theocracy, many Iranians hold on to Persian culture, seeing themselves as independent from the rest of the Middle East. The fundamentalist regime makes the consumption of alcohol and mixed-gender parties illegal, but they still secretly happen with regularity. Head coverings are mandatory and makeup is frowned-upon, but many women flout these rules, even in public when they think they can get away with it. Punishments for breaking these cultural rules can be avoided by paying a fine, which results in the wealthy having much more leeway than the poor.
While it might be cliche, the obvious takeaway is that Western countries have more in common with Iran than the uneducated (like me) might think. There is a thread of fierce personal independence and self-determination in these stories that will feel familiar to anyone who has grown up in America, as will the rifts between social classes and the mismatch between public perception and private reality.
The Potter read-through with my kids continues. It’s the fifth book in the seven-book Potter series, and everything’s falling apart. Wizard Hitler is back in town, consolidating power in secret. Meanwhile, the government refuses to believe the only evidence: the eyewitness testimony of our 15-year-old protagonist.
As a series of kids’ books, I’m willing to overlook some of the simplicity of world-building that a lot of folks like to harp on, but this book really makes it clear how dysfunctional the “wizarding world” is. There are a great many institutions that are unique in the wizarding world, and that makes it awfully easy to gain and abuse power.
There’s effectively only one wizard newspaper. The government apparently exerts tremendous control over it, and can just squash articles they don’t like. Harry only gets his story published in a homemade conspiracy zine.
There’s a very simple wizard government, with a single head of state that seems to have total control over the unicameral legislature. In fact, it’s not even clear if anyone except the wizard president even needs to sign off on new laws.
There’s a single, hellish maximum-security wizard prison, which seems to be the default punishment for any non-trivial offense. There’s a single wizard bank, just in case the all-powerful government wants to exert economic controls as well. Finally, there’s only one wizard school in the country, so it’s nice and easy to lock down that educational system.
The wizarding world is a model autocracy. No wonder a new wizard Hitler crops up every couple decades.
Anyway, this book marks Harry at his most persecuted. The all-powerful government hates him because he keeps saying that Voldemort is back, and exerts all its power to convince everyone he’s a crazy person. His friends are mostly children, so they can do very little about this. The few adults on his side have created a secret society to try to fight back, because they’d be targets for the all-powerful government if they were open about it.
The theme of being unable to depend on adults really reaches its peak here. The school is taken over by a sadistic pawn of the government, the adults who Harry trusts are picked off one-by-one, and even Dumbledore, who has always been a bit like Old Testament God (distant, but loving authority figure), purposely abandons Harry.
As usual, Harry leads the kids by ignoring all adult advice and doing what he thinks is best. On the one hand, this is a pretty bad idea because he knows full well that all the adults have been hiding a lot of information from him. He doesn’t really know what’s going on. As usual, he’s ignored their warnings. On the other hand, this has worked out well for him in every single book up to this point. Maybe if the adults wanted him to behave, they should have tried a little harder to parent the headstrong super-wizard orphan boy.
Where previous books like Prisoner of Azkaban toyed with the idea that Harry’s poorly thought-out actions might cause real problems, everything always turned out prefectly when he followed his gut. Even the first death of the series in Goblet of Fire was not really his fault. He got played by an adult he trusted. But in Order of the Phoenix, Harry lets his intuition guide him, against the advice of literally everyone, and the result is terrible.
Sure, they get incontrovertible evidence that Voldemort’s back. So that’s nice. It just costs the life of the only person Harry considers family.
There is also a problem of Harry’s personality in this book. He’s constantly angry, and generally mean to all of his friends. In the end, it turns out that he’s being psychically manipulated, but there really aren’t enough hints about what’s going on, so he just comes across as an unpleasant character for most of the book.
I won’t harp on this one, since I’ve already written a separate post about it. Suffice to say it’s the best book on writing that I’ve read in a few years.
What I’m Reading in February
Harry Potter continues. I’m halfway through a beautiful hardcover complete edition of the comic Die. I may dig into a stack of anthologies, to stay on-brand for my year of short stories. And there is always the eternal promise of jumping back into The Witcher. It could happen.
The Beginner’s Guide starts with a white screen. The voiceover says,
Hi there, thank you very much for playing The Beginner’s Guide. My name is Davey Wreden, I wrote The Stanley Parable, and while that game tells a pretty absurd story, today I’m going to tell you about a series of events that happened between 2008 and 2011. We’re going to look at the games made by a friend of mine named Coda.
Now these games mean a lot to me. I met Coda in early 2009 at a time when I was really struggling with some personal stuff, and his work pointed me in a very powerful direction. I found it to be a good reference point for the kinds of creative works that I wanted to make.
Then, without ceremony, we’re dropped into a world: a facsimile of a desert town, a map for the game Counterstrike. It’s Coda’s first “game,” and Davey proceeds to tell us why he thinks it’s interesting. He explains that he thinks these games tell us something about their creator. Coda stopped making games, and Davey wants to figure out why. He even provides his Gmail address and asks for feedback from players.
The Beginner’s Guide is not a traditional game. Like The Stanley Parable, it’s very much in “walking simulator” territory. However, where The Stanley Parable was all about choice in game narrative, The Beginner’s Guide offers few choices, and no real way to exert control over the narrative. It’s more about experience than participation. It’s a little bit like a short mystery.
The Narrator
Davey will continue to provide voice-over explanations throughout the entire experience, with very few breaks. He is the tour guide as we travel through Coda’s games, most of them little more than small experiments. While the player usually has freedom to go wherever they want within a given game, Davey moves the player from one game to the next. Davey chooses to occasionally skip the player past content that he deems unimportant, like a complicated maze, in order to keep the narrative flow.
He constantly explains the real-life context of his relationship with Coda at the time each game was made, and inserts his own theories about what these games tell us about Coda and his emotional state over the years they knew each other. He is ever-present, and influences the player’s interpretation of Coda’s games in both subtle and overt ways.
The Context
This opening sequence and everything that follows it is designed to put the player in a particular mindset. It’s a framing device, and it sets our expectations of Davey and Coda. After all, this is a pretty strange premise for a game. We know Davey is a real person. He really wrote The Stanley Parable. But is this the real Davey?
Is Coda a real person? Did he really make these games? That seems less likely. And what exactly does the title of the game mean?
Davey is inherently an unreliable narrator, but he goes to unusual lengths to establish credibility and realism. He sets himself up as a sort of documentarian, chronicling and presenting these games.
As The Beginner’s Guide progresses, an astute player may notice that Davey’s interpretations of Coda’s games sometimes make sense, and sometimes…don’t. He overlooks the obvious. He dismisses nuanced questions as uninteresting.
He also has a peculiar way of talking about Coda, his games, and the fact that he stopped making them. Everything comes back to Davey, how it makes him feel, how it fulfills (or fails to fulfill) his needs.
The Turn
Davey’s narration is well done, and his commentary is enough to keep the game interesting for the relatively short play time of The Beginner’s Guide. However, what makes the game interesting is the ending, and I won’t spoil that.
It’s enough to say that there is a particular sequence where it becomes clear who Davey really is, and this recontextualization of him forces the player to reevaluate everything he has said up to that point. It immediately changes the obvious interpretations of Coda’s games.
Writing in video games is still young, and it’s rare for a video game to do something clever enough in its writing that it deserves the notice of writers in other media. The Beginner’s Guide is not a perfect game, but the setup, the turn, and the execution throughout is worth noticing.
The Game
The Beginner’s Guide is a small game. It takes around two hours to complete and it’s available for $10 on Steam. Go check it out.
This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. The end of the year really snuck up on me. I didn’t have a lot of time to read in November due to NaNoWriMo, and I was busy with holidays in December, so I decided to roll them together into a single blog post.
As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.
Monster (Vol. 1 – 18)
By Naoki Urasawa
My interest in this series stems from watching an episode or two of the anime based on these books several years ago. Conveniently, one of my co-workers is an avid collector, so I was able to borrow the whole series over my Christmas vacation.
What s stands out about Monster is the subject matter and setting. So much anime and manga follows familiar formulas, and this one is refreshingly different.
Dr. Kenzo Tenma is a Japanese immigrant in west Germany, shortly before reunification. He is a brilliant neurosurgeon with a promising future at a prestigious hospital. He’s a favorite of the hospital’s director, and engaged to the director’s daughter.
However, Tenma has a crisis of conscience after he’s ordered to save the life of a famous performer instead of the poor immigrant worker who arrived first. The next time he has to make a similar choice, he rejects hospital politics, saving the life of a boy shot in the head, while less skilled surgeons are unable to save an important donor who came in shortly after.
Overnight, Tenma’s life begins to collapse. The director refuses to talk to him, his engagement is broken off, and he’s overlooked for promotion. His fortunes turn yet again when the director and two of his allies are found poisoned, and the remaining hospital leadership puts him in charge.
A decade later, Tenma comes across the boy he saved, now an adult. To his horror, the boy seems to be tied up in a string of serial murders, and kills a man in front of the doctor. He reveals that he was the one who poisoned Tenma’s co-workers.
With Tenma once again close to a murder, a federal investigator takes an interest in him, trying to pin all the murders on the doctor. Tenma is wracked with guilt for saving the boy who has turned out to be a monster, but he has no evidence, and only he knows the truth. When the police attempt to arrest Tenma, he decides to flee and chase down the boy he saved, to kill him and stop him from harming anyone else.
The series follows Tenma as he evades the authorities and slowly uncovers the mysterious and disturbing origins of the monster, Johan, while helping people along the way. He uncovers the history of secret psychological experiments on children, and the legacy of the people who once ran those experiments, as well as the damaged children that came out of them.
Set in 1990s Germany and Czechoslovakia, the setting is phenomenally well-executed. The characters are excellent, and the mystery is compelling. Unfortunately, I felt like the story was treading water in some of the later volumes, and the conclusion wasn’t as satisfying as the opening. Regardless, this is still a fantastic manga, and a great story for anyone who is turned off by the usual anime/manga tropes and settings.
The Department of Truth is a comic built on the well-worn fantasy premise that peoples’ collective belief can physically change the world. It feels especially relevant in our current moment, when it sometimes feels like our different political and cultural factions are living in entirely different universes.
Cole Turner is a teacher at Quantico specializing in home-grown American extremism. In the course of his research, he attends a flat-earther convention, where he attends a showing of Stanley Kubric’s fake moon landing tapes before being whisked off with a select group on a private jet to see something even more impossible: the literal edge of the world. The trip is cut short when the group is unceremoniously gunned-down, and Cole is taken in for questioning by a group calling themselves The Department of Truth.
The Department of Truth is the secret government agency responsible for monitoring the effects that collective beliefs have on the fabric of reality, and keeping them in check. What exactly does that entail? Well, that’s the complicated part. They cut down conspiracy theories, killing and ruining lives when they deem it necessary for the greater good. It’s a messy job. The agency’s leader, none other than Lee Harvey Oswald, recruits Cole as a new member.
This first volume does a good job laying the groundwork of setting and characters, and brewing up a big fight. There’s an enemy organization called Black Hat working against the Department of Truth. They are trying to change the narrative, to put real evidence of the conspiracy theories out into the world. They want to reveal and destroy the Department of Truth, and it turns out they’ve been watching Cole for a long time.
Unlike similar stories, this doesn’t shy away from real, modern conspiracies. In this first volume it touches on classics like the Kennedy assassination and the satanic panic, but it also hits Obama’s birth certificate, “pizzagate,” Epstein’s suicide, flat earth, school shooting “crisis actors,” 9/11 as an inside job, and the whole QAnon/deep-state mish-mash. There’s effectively infinite material for them to riff on, since conspiracy theories are practically mainstream these days.
The book also features a gay main character, without making a big fuss about it. Unfortunately, Cole’s personal life with his husband is hardly touched on. Between the conference and his recruitment, he goes missing for a couple of days, and it results in a mildly heated argument. The relationship boils down to one face-to-face scene and a phone call in this first volume. I would have liked to have gotten more, and it would help to flesh out Cole as a character. However, there’s a lot of hinting that his background will tie into the story more and more as we go deeper, so I’m hopeful that there will be more in future volumes.
The art style is grimy, dark, and impressionistic. It’s more about conveying mood than the literal scenery, and the moods are not generally happy ones. Characters’ inner thoughts are expressed as shadowy images lurking behind them. Almost every image is filtered through TV scan lines, ink splatters, deep chiaroscuro shadows, and scribbled linework. This intense abstraction is appropriate for a story where there’s a blurring between truth and fiction, and dark things really are lurking in the shadows.
Unfortunately, the darkness and the abstraction sometimes make it hard to tell what is actually happening. On more than one occasion, I found myself having to re-read a two-page spread because the panel order wasn’t clear from the layout. I don’t mind unusual layouts (Sandman Overture is still my favorite art in any comic, and it almost never uses “normal” layouts), but there’s a real difficulty in not confusing the reader. The Department of Truth doesn’t always quite hit that mark.
Overall, I really enjoyed the Department of Truth, Vol. 1, and I’ll definitely be picking up more of the series.
The Potter read-through with kids continues. This is the middle book of the series, and it feels like a middle book. There are still a few of the kid-centric tropes and patterns that have repeated through the earlier volumes, like a red-herring bad guy and a mystery to be solved. It’s also doing a lot of work to set up everything that’s going to happen in the next three books.
This book clearly signals darker stuff to come, with the main villain finally arriving, and a death near the end of the book. Still, I couldn’t help feel that the dead character wasn’t actually all that important in the grand scheme of the story. There is a broad cast of side characters that have been built up across the first few books, and any one of them dying would have had more impact.
Once again, the biggest lesson this series teaches is that adults are all useless. They’re either outright evil, incompetent, or just don’t trust the kids enough to inform or direct them in any useful way. Of course, this is a theme that’s pretty common in kids’ books. It wouldn’t be fun if the adults took care of everything.
What I’m Reading in January
Harry Potter continues, I dig into more of the comics I got for Christmas, and I’ll definitely (probably) finally return to the Witcher series. See you then.
House of Leaves is a 2000 novel by Mark Z. Danielewski. I don’t have a very precise memory of when I first read it, but it must have been about fifteen years ago. It is a formative book for me, and parts of it took up permanent residence in my head. Yet when I reread it this past October, I had to admit that I had no memory of large swaths of the book. That seems somehow appropriate for a sprawling, layered story with unreliable narrators and intentional inconsistencies.
Despite being a best-seller that continues to be reprinted, House of Leaves feels like a cult classic. It has ardent fans, but it seems too esoteric and weird to be truly mainstream. The people who love it will be the first to admit that it is not an easy read, and the people who hate it will declaim it barely readable at all. It generates the same sort of divisive conversations as Ulysses (or Homestuck).
After my recent reading, I dove down the rabbit hole of online information, arguments and discussions about the book. I learned about some of the many things I had missed. I was amazed and a little appalled by the number of secrets hidden in the text, the number of subtle allusions and not-so-subtle codes. I have to admit that I may now be a member of the strange cult obsessed with this book. So, while I touched on it briefly in my October Read Report, I feel obligated to write something more about House of Leaves.
I don’t have much interest in writing traditional reviews, but this is a review of sorts. If nothing else, I hope it gives you an idea of what the book is like, and whether you’re likely to love it or hate it.
Zampanò
The title page of the book says, “Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, by Zampanò, with Introduction and Notes by Johnny Truant.” The origins and provenance are purposely muddled. The intermingling of stories and frames, reality and fiction, starts before the first word.1
The book starts with Johnny, but we’ll start with Zampanò.
Zampanò is a blind old man who lives by himself in a run-down apartment. He has done his best to seal up the windows and the crack under the door. Among his few possessions is a battered trunk filled with notes and a half-finished manuscript for a scholarly analysis of a film called The Navidson Record.
We can infer a little about Zampanò from his work. It is riddled with footnotes, and certainly makes a variety of assertions about The Navidson Record, but these are all suspect. He often discusses the visuals, despite being blind. Johnny’s notes point out that there is no evidence that a film called The Navidson Record ever existed (even within the story) and the many works of criticism for the film that Zampanò cites are fabricated as well.
Johnny never meets Zampanò. He only hears things about him second-hand.2 He talks to the various people who came to read to the old man. He hears about Zampanò’s ritualistic daily walks around the perimeter of the apartment complex’s overgrown courtyard.
Ultimately, the only real interaction between Zampanò and Johnny is that the old man dies, and Johnny’s friend Lude gets him into the apartment to look for interesting stuff left behind. Johnny takes the trunk full of Zampanò’s half-finished book, and begins to read and edit it.
That’s where his troubles really start.
The Navidson Record
The Navidson Record doesn’t exist. Johnny tells us that pretty early on. But the portions of the book that belong to Zampanò are so persistent in their certainty that they make it feel real.
Zampanò describes The Five and a Half Minute Hallway and Exploration #4, viral videos that spread via bootleg VHS and the early internet. They both turn out to be excerpts from The Navidson Record. The first shows a door in an exterior wall that opens onto a hallway that cannot possibly exist. The second shows the endless maze of dark rooms at the other end of that hallway.
Zampanò describes the film itself. Famous photojournalist Will Navidson moves, with his partner, Karen Green and their two children, to an old house in rural Virginia. Giving up more dangerous projects like war photography, Navidson plans to document this new stage in their lives with video journals that he and Karen keep, as well as motion-activated cameras set up around the house. The pair’s internal traumas and external relationship struggles are present, but suppressed. For a time, the house seems idyllic.
Then, it begins to change shape. At first this is subtle, a matter of a mere 1/4 inch across its entire length. Then individual rooms begin to change size. Navidson becomes obsessed with measuring these tiny changes, but they soon become so obvious that measurement is not necessary. A new hallway appears between two rooms. A door appears in an exterior wall, but it doesn’t open onto the yard. It leads to an apparently endless maze of hallways, rooms, and stairs, unlit and frigid.
The tensions between Will and Karen quickly reach a breaking point. She wanted to escape the fear that accompanied Will going out into danger to capture his photos. But the mysterious extra-dimensional portion of the house is too alluring. He is desperate to explore it.
Instead, he brings in outsiders: a scientist, and a trio of expert mountaineers. While he remains in the house, manning the radio at “base camp,” the three explorers set out on a series of expeditions, surveying the ever-changing architecture beyond the impossible hallway and even taking samples from the walls. They carry his video cameras with them.
These videos document the rare moments when the dimensions of the house visibly change around them. They document the strange way things break down within the bowels of the house; markers and supply caches shredded or vanished, buttons and zippers disappearing from their clothing. They document the eerie growl that sometimes passes over them like a wave, or follows at a distance.
And though they aren’t collected until much later, they document exactly how everything goes horribly wrong.
Exhibits and Appendices
The last section of the book contains six “exhibits” and three appendices. However, to say that these are the conclusion of the book is only technically true. Just as Johnny’s narrative inserted into footnotes encourages the reader to jump back and forth between layers of story, other footnotes point to the appendixes and encourage the reader to dig into them in the first few chapters.
The exhibits are unfinished. They are things that Zampanò hoped to include: scientific analysis of the samples Navidson and others took from the house, reproductions of interviews, a section on architecture, an excerpt from an Air Force manual, and some of Karen’s medical records, along with related excerpts from psychiatric literature.
The first appendix is filled with the writings of Zampanò. Johnny’s note tells us that these are included to shed more light on the man. Notably, among Zampanò’s poems is an untitled fragment that contains the only reference to the book’s title within the text:
Little solace comes
to those who grieve
when thoughts keep drifting
as walls keep shifting
and this great blue world of ours
seems a house of leaves
moments before the wind.
The second appendix contains Johnny’s items: sketches and polaroids, poems and collages, his father’s obituary, and “The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute Letters,” correspondence between Johnny and his erudite and apparently schizophrenic mother, long institutionalized.
These letters are arguably the most important thing in the appendices, and act almost as a third narrative alongside Zampanò’s and Johnny’s, revealing and clarifying many details from Johnny’s account, and raising new questions.
Formatting
Some footnotes are referenced in multiple places. Some are missing. Most use numbers, but some use a variety of strange symbols that may or may not relate to the text. There are footnotes to footnotes, occasionally several levels deep.
But beyond the unusual use of footnotes, there are many other formatting oddities in House of Leaves.
There is the use of color: house always appears in blue, several struck sections in red, and one particular phrase in purple.
A single bar of music is printed sideways, running vertically down the page.
In two different sections of The Navidson Record, the shape of the text reflects the shape of the narrative or the shape of the house.
It is contained within sidebars or blue-bordered squares, running forward and backward along the pages, turned sideways and upside down.
It is spread out,
only a few words per page,
as the characters run,
frantic,
through the labyrinth.
It is drawn out slowly, as the text explores the meaning in a few slowed frames of film.
It is cramped and tight, as the halls of the house narrow, sloped in diagonals as the explorers move downhill, separated by a vast gulf of
white space
when they encounter a chasm.
Although the story itself is sometimes unclear or frustratingly abstract, it is this shaping of the text on the page that presents the first barrier a reader must overcome to form any connection with House of Leaves. But it is also an invitation to the reader. The text practically demands interpretation. Why these colors? Why this formatting? Why must I follow a footnote to a footnote to a letter in Appendix B?
Your instinctive reaction to this—excitement or irritation—is a good indicator of whether you will enjoy the book.
A few of the fooTnotes contain Huge lIstS of places, names of archItectS, etc., etc. At first glaNce, these appear tO be poinTless. AsTute readers, after discovering tHe sEcret cOdes spelled out iN PeLafina’s “Whalestoe Letters” through misplaced capital letters and acrostics, have applied the same codes to these lists, and discovered that theY also contain hidden Messages. One codE, embedded in the Navidson Record, SeemS relAted to those letters. Another spells Danielewski’s full name.
In my hardcover edition, there are also hundreds of 4-diGit hExadecimal codes imprinted on the inside of the cover. Some enterprising individual determined that these describe part of a music file: a snippet from the companion album to the book, Haunted, by Poe (the stage name of Danielewski’s sister).
Do these secrets add anything meaningful to the story? Hard to say, but they certainly evoke a feeling that there are hidden meanings everywhere in House of Leaves, if only the reader is willing to dig deep enough.
How many levels of frame story are there? Well, there’s the Navidson Record, and all the collected ephemera around it: interviews and articles, books and art, arguments, analysis and critique. There’s Zampanò’s written analysis of the film. There are Johnny’s notes on Zampanò’s work. And there are the fictional editors, who chime in occasionally to clarify a point or cite a source that Johnny never got around to. There is Danielewski, the real author, almost invisible. But there’s also Johnny’s institutionalized mother, Pelafina, who sends him letters (or does she) of varied lucidity. The really obsessive fans have their own theories about her, but I won’t spoil them.3↩︎
Johnny’s story is told in notes and footnotes, denoted only by a different font. Sometimes these notes comment on Zampanò’s work, but they often wander away from the subject at hand, into long and meandering anecdotes from Johnny’s life. As the book progresses, they become less and less decipherable, entire pages of run-on sentence. ↩︎
Even more perplexing, these frames are fuzzy; the stories leak out of their original context. Late in the story, Johnny encounters a group of strangers who are obsessed with a story that has been passed around the early internet, and it turns out to be a version of the account we’re reading. In Zampanò’s summary of The Navidson Record, Will Navidson, lost within the labyrinth of the house, burns his final matches to read a book, and the book is House of Leaves. These examples of impossible recursion are never explained. ↩︎
Be warned: this post contains spoilers for the movie Arrival.
The fantastic Blade Runner 2049 was the first movie to put Canadian director Denis Villeneuve on my radar. As the sequel to a 35-year-old cult classic, it had every right to be another bland, disappointing Hollywood cash grab. Instead, it managed to capture the essence of what made the original movie great, and built on those themes in a way that somehow felt cohesive. Dune (Part One) in 2021—for my money, the best screen adaptation of a story that has stymied directors for decades—confirmed that the quality of Blade Runner 2049 was no accident.
I recently watched Arrival, a 2016 sci-fi film about first contact with a mysterious, seven-limbed, octopus-like alien race, dubbed “heptapods.” I came away astounded by the story and the execution, and then discovered that this is yet another Villeneuve masterpiece, adapted from Ted Chiang’s Nebula Award winning short, “Story of Your Life.” At this point, I’ll watch any movie Villeneuve makes. I don’t even need to see a trailer.
Arrival follows linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams), who is recruited by the U.S. Army to attempt to communicate with the aliens. However, our first introduction to Banks is a flashback: tender strings play over her narration as she speaks to her daughter about the nature of memory.
I used to think this was the beginning of your story.
Memory is a strange thing.
It doesn’t work like I thought it did.
We are so bound by time, by its order.
We watch a montage of her daughter as newborn, child, teenager.
I remember the middle.
But all is not well. Her daughter is examined in a hospital room. Banks looks on, her fear written on her face. Conversations with a doctor at the end of a long, dark hallway.
This was the end.
she narrates, as we see her crying over the hospital bed where her daughter lays, head shaved, utterly still.
Moments in the Middle
Life moves on. Banks works as a university professor, and this is where we catch up with her, watching (along with the rest of the world) as twelve alien ships descend to different parts of Earth. The Army comes to recruit her, and she’s whisked off to Montana in a helicopter. She’s partnered with physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), and they begin making regular visits to the alien craft, which opens a section to them once per day.
Inside the ship, they meet a pair of heptapods, who observe them from a separate, misty chamber through a glass wall.
Banks begins the process of communication, discovering that the aliens have a rich written language, but seemingly no concept of linear time. Their script is circular, and each sentence has no defined beginning or end.
They work under the scrutiny of government officials who are so afraid of the aliens that they seem perpetually on the verge of launching an attack. As they learn more about the aliens and their language, Banks also grows closer to Donnelly. But there is still a distance between them. There are more flashbacks of Banks with her daughter. They skirt around the subject of the husband and father who left them.
The source of this lingering depression and detachment is obvious to the viewer. Banks was broken by the loss of her daughter and the estrangement from her husband. Under the pressure of the situation, this is only growing worse. Banks immerses herself in the alien language. Software is built to speed up translation. She begins to dream about the heptapods and their circular sentences.
Things come to a head when diplomacy breaks down between the twelve countries hosting alien craft. China and Russia are poised to attack the aliens, calling them a threat to humanity. Through her incomplete translation of the alien language, Banks has uncovered references to what might be a tool, or might be a weapon. What if the aliens use this weapon on them? What if they give it to one country, but not the others?
At this critical moment, Banks has a revelation. The weapon is the alien language itself. Language shapes thought, and she is so immersed in their language that she begins to think like them. She is no longer bound by linear thought. Cause and effect are simultaneous.
But this isn’t just a revelation to Banks, it’s also a revelation to the audience. She doesn’t just remember the past, she remembers the future as well. She remembers meeting the Chinese general sometime in the future. He will tell her that her phone call to him was the reason he called off the attack. So, in the here-and-now, she steals a sat-phone and calls the private Chinese phone number that she will be told by the general. She says the words he has not yet told her, the dying words of his own wife, “in war, there are no winners, only widows.”
The attack is called off. The lines of communication re-open. The aliens close their ships and leave, saying only that they will return when they need the aid of humanity, in three thousand years.
With the crisis averted, Donnelly and Banks admit their feelings for each other. For Donnelly, this is a joyful moment, but for Banks and the audience, it’s bittersweet. We now know the truth.
Those flashbacks weren’t flashbacks at all. They were memories of the future. She will have a daughter, knowing full well what will eventually happen to her. She will marry Donnelly, knowing that he will leave, that he will be unable to bear the weight of the truth: that she chose this path, even though she knew what would happen.
Flashing Forward
This twist ending works for three reasons.
It is carefully telegraphed.
It relies on extremely familiar story structures.
It ties the personal stakes to the universal.
The opening scenes of the movie are powerful on first viewing. What’s more heartbreaking than a parent losing their child? The audience hears the narration about beginnings, middles, and ends, and takes it at face value: these scenes sketch the outline of a life cut short. But the narration is really a giant hint toward the twist at the end, a hint whose meaning isn’t apparent until it arrives.
Because the story opens with this scene, it needs to be relevant to the ending. Symmetry is critical to a feeling of closure. However, like any good magic act, the film immediately provides a flashy misdirection. What could more effectively distract us from Banks’s personal tragedy than first contact with aliens?
This also creates two sets of stakes: the personal, affecting only Banks; and the universal, affecting every person on Earth. As Chuck Wendig so aptly explains in Damn Fine Story, linking the personal and universal stakes is incredibly powerful. The only caveat is that the audience doesn’t yet understand how the personal and universal stakes tie together.
As the story progresses, we see several “flashbacks,” further illuminating what we believe to be Banks’s past. Modern audiences are so familiar with flashbacks, we automatically assume that these scenes, intercut with the first contact story, must have already happened. There are a few allusions to Banks dreaming these scenes, or woolgathering due to stress and lack of sleep, but it takes almost no effort to convince us that these are flashbacks, because they use a structure that we have seen countless times.
It is only in Act Three, when we have been introduced to the aliens’ non-linear language, where we get hints that not all is as it seems. Banks’s young daughter draws crude figures that look suspiciously like heptapods. Is she prescient? Is Banks mis-remembering or hallucinating? This throws the audience off-balance, revealing that the flashbacks we thought we understood are something we need to question. It primes us for the revelation.
When the twist comes, it is wonderfully effective. Firstly, the protagonist and the audience understand what’s happening at the same time! We feel exactly what Banks is feeling, because we’re all having the same experience.
Secondly, it ties the personal and universal stakes together. This revelation saves the Earth from war, but it also allows Banks to make sense of her life and her perplexing memories of a future that hasn’t happened yet.
Finally, it creates that symmetry between the end and the beginning. The narration from the opening scene lands on us with a new weight. An already powerful scene is supercharged as it becomes the crux of the story.
Arrivals and Departures
Non-linear storytelling works because it allows us to hide important information without frustrating the audience. Simply hiding information while telling a story in sequence is a surefire way to make the audience hate you, but by telling the story out of order, you can create a mystery for the audience to solve where there would otherwise be a series of straightforward events.
Non-linearity is used brilliantly in Arrival, because the characters themselves are experiencing the story out of order. The title is a reference to the aliens arriving on Earth. It is also a reference to the birth of Banks’s daughter, which is both the opening of the movie and, in some ways, the end.
This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.
Having finished rereading all the books in the main Sandman series, I figured I would top it all off with the two stand-alone Sandman volumes. The first of these is Dream Hunters, which was published three years after the 1996 wrap of the main series.
Dream Hunters comes in the form factor of a graphic novel, but it is actually an illustrated short story in five parts. There are a variety of different layouts, including many full page illustrations and some two-page paintings and both horizontal and vertical splits. There is even a double-fold-out illustration, four pages wide. Amano’s inks, pencils and watercolors mingle to create a variety of effects, sometimes clear, other times murky or abstract.
The story is a retelling of a Japanese folk tale, “The Fox, the Monk, and the Mikado of All Night’s Dreaming.” A magical fox falls in love with a lonely monk who maintains a small and forgotten shrine. When a powerful sorcerer tries to kill the monk in his dreams, the fox intercepts those dreams to protect him.
This is one of those classic Sandman side-stories where Dream is involved, but only as a side character. It’s a good story with great art, but not really necessary to pick up unless you’re already in love with the series.
Unlike Dream Hunters, Endless Nights is a proper comic. This is an anthology of stories, each with a different illustrator, and each one focused on one of the seven Endless: Death, Dream, Desire, Delirium, Destruction, Despair, and Destiny. Again, these could be considered side-stories to the main series, but they feel closer to the main series in tone and style, and they do offer a few interesting tidbits for die-hard fans.
Some light is shed on Dream and his interactions with Desire, when they attend a gathering of sentient stars some few billion years ago. We see what might be the first of Dream’s many ill-fated romances, and the source of animosity between Dream and Desire. We also get to see what Destruction is up to in his exile, and hints that he may yet reach a kind of friendly ambivalence with his family, even if they never quite see eye-to-eye.
I really like Endless Nights. If The Wake was the epilogue to the main story, then this feels like a reunion.
I continue to work through the series with my kids. This third book feels like the inflection point to me, still largely plotted in a way to appeal to relatively young kids, but beginning to ramp up the darker themes.
At this point, it’s clear there is something of a formula that the books follow. Again, it leans on couple of mysteries to keep the plot moving. Again, there is a red herring that is pushed hard. Where this book differs is in the long third act, which wraps everything up with a fun time-travel sequence that has to interweave with a series of events that we already read from a different point of view.
While it’s popular to knock the Harry Potter books these days, especially for their plot holes, the time travel opens up a pretty egregious one. Sure, as in Back to the Future, a big deal is made over the “dangers” of seeing yourself while time traveling. But then main characters do it anyway, and it turns out perfectly fine. Unlike Back to the Future, the Harry Potter books barely mention time travel again, which is a little hard to swallow.
I didn’t intend to read House of Leaves again. I was talking with my son about the Backrooms, and how it seemed like it was inspired by House of Leaves. I went to grab my slightly beat-up paperback copy and discovered that it wasn’t on the shelf. Then I remembered I had loaned it to a friend, years ago. So I ordered myself a new copy.
When the book arrived, I popped it open, just to enjoy the sections where the text went all wonky. I went back to the beginning, to see how it started. Before I knew it, I was fully absorbed. It’s probably been over ten years since I last read it, and there was a lot I had forgotten.
House of Leaves is a strange book. At its heart is a horror premise: a house that somehow contains an infinite, shifting, maze-like series of rooms and corridors, where one might become lost forever. Wrapped around that core are multiple layers of frame stories and linguistic complexity.
I could go on about this book, but it’ll have to wait for another post. Suffice to say that it’s just as enjoyable as I remembered, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in reading something genuinely weird.
What I’m Reading in November
With NaNoWriMo looming, I probably won’t be reading much. If I do get ahead and end up with some free time, I expect I’ll finally get back to The Witcher or delve into a new comics series.
Words Deferred 